Gnucash 2.4.0 (Windows)

[Geert Janssens]

On Friday 31 December 2010, Mortimer wrote:
> >> 3. I do not know 127.0.0.1, I do not know what information is being
> >> passed to/from that address, I wish to block ALL traffic between gnucash
> >> and 127.0.0.1. Doing so makes gnucash 2.4.0 worthless
> > 
> > Well, if you don't want to talk to yourself I suppose that is your
> > prerogative.  The fact that microsoft hides localhost from its users is
> 
> Well as I had stated I had no idea that "localhost" was 127.0.0.1.
> Everytime I had heard of local host before it was called just that,
> localhost.
> 
> Perhaps if you had stated that 127.0.0.1 was the same as localhost in
> your previous message......
> 
And that's exactly the ugly thing Microsoft did. On Windows, localhost is NOT 
equal to 127.0.0.1.

127.0.0.1 is truly the internal loopback adapter, so when GnuCash tries to 
access 127.0.0.1, it is truly trying to talk to another process on your 
machine and never leaves your system.

On any platform except Windows, 127.0.0.1 is also what localhost points to, so 
accessing localhost on all platforms but Windows is exactly the same as 
accessing 127.0.0.1

Unfortunatly, Microsoft decided to make localhost refer to your physical 
network card (the one that connects you to the internet or your local 
network).
This means that accessing localhost on your Windows PC is equivalent to 
accessing your internet connection. At least that's what your Firewall thinks, 
but even when accessing localhost the request never leaves your PC with or 
without firewall. The low level network stack of your operating system knows 
that your physical network card is local and so it would never send out 
information when it gets a request to access "the machine behind your physical 
network card" which is what localhost on Windows refers to.

It is just very unfortunate Microsoft decided to separate localhost and 
127.0.0.1. It is easy to configure a firewall to trust that IP address and the 
universal "localhost" domainname associated with it. It is much harder to tell 
your firewall to trust the IP address that is assigned to your physical 
network card, because depending on your network configuration this IP address 
can change regularly.

To conclude: please configure your firewall to allow connections to and from 
127.0.0.1.

According to the bug mentioned earlier in this thread, that should solve the 
problem.

Geert